Qualla: Keren, Eritrea

Keren, Eritrea: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SBereket, CC BY-SA 3.0. The baobab tree in Keren has a chapel inside its trunk. In 1941, Italian soldiers sheltering from British planes took refuge in the hollow where the shrine of St. Maryam Deari had been tended for generations. The tree was hit. The shrine survived. So did the soldiers, and so did the baobab, which still stands today in the basin where Keren sprawls under its ring of granite mountains. This is the story Keren tells about itself: armies come through, buildings rise and fall, empires claim and relinquish - and what endures is what was always there, the Bilen and Tigre people who have called these hills home for centuries, and the tree that keeps growing around everything thrown at it.

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Image: SBereket | CC BY-SA 3.0

Keren, Eritrea: The Caravan Crossroads

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. Keren sits in a wide basin 1,590 meters above sea level, 91 kilometers northwest of Asmara, ringed on all sides by granitic mountains. For most of its history it was a trading settlement, straddling the route between the Red Sea port of Massawa and Sudan. In the mid-nineteenth ce...

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Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Keren, Eritrea: Missionaries, Egyptians, and a Very Bad Year

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. In 1851, two Lazarist missionaries named Giuseppe Sapeto and Giovanni Stella arrived. Four years later Stella built a stone house and started an Italian agricultural colony. He died in 1869 and the colony dissolved when Rome refused to send any help. Then in 1871, Emperor Yohanne...

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Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Keren, Eritrea: The Modernization Nobody Asked For

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. The Italians built. Between 1906 and 1916, the Administration building, the Commercial Bank, Cinema Impero, and the European residential complexes went up. When fascism came, so did Caza Del Fache and Caza Del Majori, meant as recreation and residence for Italian settlers. In 191...

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Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Keren, Eritrea: The Battle, the Baobab, and Liberation

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mheidegger, CC BY 4.0. Then came the Second World War. In February and March 1941, British and Indian troops fought one of the toughest campaigns of the African war against Italian defenders dug into the Keren hills. The place called Tenkuluhas, the Bilen name meaning roughly where the gigantic forces ...

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Image: Mheidegger | CC BY 4.0

Keren, Eritrea: What Keren Keeps

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. Today around 120,000 people live in Keren, the capital of the Anseba Region and Eritrea's second-largest city. The climate is hot and semi-arid, softened by the elevation. Monsoonal rains come in June, July, August, and September; the rest of the year is dry and bright. The Bilen...

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Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0